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The Case for Crazy Philanthropy
An unprecedented amount of private philanthropy is flowing into science and medicine these days. Multiple private foundations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Gates Foundation, each with over $20 billion endowments, focus mostly or solely on science, and there are more philanthropists than can be listed who are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in one fell swoop.
Similarly, DiMaggio and Powell point to the historic example of Japanese officials in the 19th century who quite expressly studied and tried to imitate “the courts, Army, and police in France, the Navy and postal system in Great Britain, and banking and art education in the United States.” And if you’re Leland Stanford or Amos Throop in the 1880s, you look to what other major universities are doing. Einstein would later call it a “ palace of science,” and Loomis helped fund and create everything from Enrico Fermi’s plans for a nuclear chain reactor to the Radiation Lab at MIT that developed radar systems used in World War II—many of those same scientists were then employed by the Manhattan Project. The rest of academia, including at Harvard, might turn up their noses, but Avi Loeb has managed to find philanthropic support from the likes of crypto-entrepreneur Charles Hoskinson, early Google employee Eugene Jhong, Bill Linton, and Joerg Laukien.
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